An intensive care unit is a hospital unit staffed and equipped to provide intensive care. An increase of requirements on doors used in intensive care units has recently been seen. One requirement is that a intensive care unit door is trackless, that is, the door does not have any threshold or similar arrangement across the door opening, so as to minimize collection of bacteria and various types of debris, and such that patients and intensive care unit equipment can be easily moved through the door opening. Another requirement is that the door should have a UL air leakage rated seal around its perimeter, in order to create a seal that serves to minimize smoke or germ contamination inside the room by reducing air leakage and infiltration.
Furthermore, the door should have a positive latch, that is, the door should be possible to secure to the door jamb or opposing door, so that the door cannot open by itself after the door has been closed. A positive latch is also required to have and a handle that protrudes from the door face.
However, these strict requirements may cause problems to the staff in the hospitals in several situation, when a fast opening of the door is required e.g. due to an emergency message such as a “life alert” or a fire alarm, when valuable life saving seconds are lost when sliding the door out of the way.
Another problem related do doors in intensive care units, may be that visitors, janitorial worker, interns, nurses and doctors all are touching the same lever handle to open the door before visiting the patient. Hence, infectious disease can quickly be spread from room to room.
It may also be desirable to allow or disallow unwanted visitors by keeping the door to an intensive care unit closed and locked, when only approved personnel should be allowed access to the intensive care unit.
Therefore, finding a way of controlling the doors in an intensive care unit, which mitigates or alleviates the above-mentioned drawbacks, would be most welcome.